Place-based Audio Storytelling with Detour

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Luisa Beck & Steve Rubin, Place-based audio storytelling with Detour. What if San Francisco could talk? What stories would it tell you? Detour uses your phone to turn audio tours into hour-long stories that unfold as you walk. With authentic narrators and film-quality sound design and scoring, taking a Detour is like walking around inside a movie. Storytellers create Detours using software called Descript. This tool links word processing, mapping, and audio editing features to help a user create and and edit their script, plot their tour's route, and position audio and images throughout the tour. In this talk, the speakers take you behind the scenes of a new storytelling medium and show you the software they’re developing to let anyone create immersive audio tours.

Luisa Beck is a Producer at Detour. After graduating from UC Berkeley, she worked as a radio producer, education researcher, and web developer before wandering into the world of place-based storytelling.

Steve Rubin is an Engineer at Detour. In his UC Berkeley PhD dissertation—advised by Maneesh Agrawala—he focused on creating software for editing audio stories. He’s continuing to design and build new audio editing tools at Detour.

Interactive media and games increasingly pervade and shape our society. In addition to their dominant roles in entertainment, videogames play growing roles in education, arts, science and health. This seminar series brings together a diverse set of experts to provide interdisciplinary perspectives on these media regarding their history, technologies, scholarly research, industry, artistic value and potential future. As the speakers and title suggest, the series also provides a topical lens for the diverse aspects of our lives.